Bronze Sculpture for Sale
United States
• 1967
Biography
Simone Leigh is an American contemporary artist born in 1967 in Chicago, a major figure in contemporary sculpture, ceramics, and monumental installation. Her work is now essential to the international contemporary art scene, particularly for its exploration of Black female subjectivity, diasporic memory, the history of African and African-American art, as well as questions of power, representation, and symbolic architecture.
A graduate of Earlham College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art with a minor in Philosophy in 1990, Simone Leigh has developed a practice deeply informed by critical thinking, cultural studies, and craft traditions. Her intellectual and artistic training feeds into a body of work that intersects philosophy, Black feminism, social history, and vernacular sculptural forms.
Her work is characterized by the use of terracotta, bronze , glazed ceramics, video, and performance. Leigh is particularly known for her monumental sculptures of Black female figures, often hybrids, where the body merges with architectural forms inspired by vernacular dwellings in West Africa and the southern United States. Among her most iconic works is Brick House (2019), a monument over 15 feet tall installed on the High Line in New York City, which has become an iconic image of contemporary public sculpture.
Her artistic language is rooted in research around diasporic memory, African traditions, ritual objects, women's knowledge, and historically marginalized narratives. She describes her practice as auto-ethnographic, seeking to place Black women at the center of visual and social history.
Simone Leigh has received some of the most prestigious accolades in the art world, including the Hugo Boss Prize in 2018 and most notably the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she became the first black woman to represent the United States in the American pavilion with the Sovereignty exhibition.
His works have been exhibited in major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Today, Simone Leigh is considered one of the most important artists of her generation, redefining the links between sculpture, identity, historical memory, and Black feminism.
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